Exemplary embodiments relate generally to call routing, and more particularly, to methods, systems and computer program products for providing multi-level natural language call routing.
Companies offering consumer products or services usually provide call center agents to assist consumers. After picking up the telephone, the agent asks the caller to describe the reason for the telephone call. If that agent cannot help the caller, the telephone call can then be transferred to another agent who is more qualified to help the caller. Because of high agent cost, companies would like to find a way to automate the agent tasks. Companies could reduce their cost per telephone call by utilizing an interactive voice response (IVR) system to respond to caller requests before transferring the telephone call to live agents.
Traditionally, consumers interact with an IVR system using the telephone keypad. The caller hears a few options, each having an associated key to press. Earlier services using speech recognition technology directly replaced touch-tone menus with speech menus. For example, a caller may hear: “for account balance, press one or say one.” Later speech recognition services allowed callers to say one of highly constrained spoken commands. For instance, a caller may hear: “for account balance, say balance.” More complex speech recognition services determine the caller's task by asking a series of questions, which is called a directed strategy.
There are several disadvantages of a menu system. If there are more than a few routing destinations, the menus will be arranged in hierarchical layers and it can take a relatively long time for the caller to get to the proper destination. A caller may misunderstand the options, and select a wrong key, which then causes the IVR to misdirect the telephone call.